“As 1982 drew to a close,” Isaacson [writes in his biography of Jobs], “Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time‘s Man of the Year.”

The word in the Time/Life building, where I was an even more junior writer, was that managing editor Ray Cave was waiting until the last minute to choose between Jobs and the magazine’s first “Machine of the Year.”

That rumor turned out to be a subterfuge. “We never considered Jobs,” Cave later told Isaacson.

But nobody told Steve Jobs …

“They FedExed me the magazine,” Jobs says in Isaacson’s book, “and I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought ‘Huh?’ And then I read the article [about him], and it was so awful that I actually cried.”